SSPB-003: Roar Like a Bear, Sting Like a Bee
by StellarStylus
Summary: Plot bunny one-shot, up for adoption. What if Rachel the Animorph was reborn as Chloe Bourgeois? How would she fare as the hero Queen Bee in this strange new world? Insert & Isekai story; now turned into the full-length multi-chapter story "Butterfly Effect Elsewhere"


DISCLAIMER: I don't own either _Miraculous_ or _Animorphs_; the former belongs to Thomas Astruc, Zagtoon and Method Animation, and the latter belongs to K.A. Applegate and Scholastic. This is just a one-shot which came to mind, but a plot bunny potentially worth exploring.

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"Roar Like a Bear, Sting Like a Bee"

by StellarStylus

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When she died aboard the enemy spaceship, she wasn't expecting to be reborn as the daughter of the mayor of Paris in a totally different world where superheroes existed.

Oh, she didn't know everything from the get-go. She somehow _knew_ that she was different somehow, ever since she was a little girl... but it was only after a traumatic fight with her estranged mother the day before her own twelfth birthday that all her memories from her previous life were unlocked from somewhere deep within the recesses of her mind.

The morning of her twelfth birthday, she'd woken up, screaming and crying about some kind of nightmare about being trapped in an underground lair with evil slugs who could take control of people's bodies, and she was forced to transform into wild animals to kill them. Her father had done his best to comfort her, and as the day went on, she slowly pushed it back to the darkest corners of her mind. By the time that day's birthday party and celebration had rolled around, she was back to her normal self, or so it seemed..

But then when she had the nightmares again the next night — and many more nights after that — she knew that something was very wrong.

Ultimately, she finally remembered her previous life as a girl named Rachel Berenson.

But it wouldn't do to have Chloe Bourgeois, daughter of the mayor of Paris, Andre Bourgeois, ranting and raving about living past lives and fighting alien invaders from other planets.

She pretended and did her best to be ignorant of the fact that she knew more than she should. But sometimes it slipped, like her somehow knowing perfect English, despite being born and raised in France which naturally made French her first language.

And then came _that_ day.

The day she got her Miraculous.

The day she met Pollen.

The day she became Queen Bee.

The day she became a hero... _again_.

Rachel thought she'd gotten the shock of her life — in _either_ life she'd had so far — when she and her four friends encountered the dying Andalite War-Prince Elfangor in that abandoned construction site, and he gave them the power to resist the Yeerks. But somehow the existence of _magic_ had blown her mind in a way that even _aliens_ couldn't.

_I'm trapped in some comic book nerd's fever dream,_ she'd thought to herself countless times. It had already been a month since it all began, when the villain calling himself Hawk Moth had sent his first minions to terrorize the city of Paris, and two new heroes, Ladybug and Cat Noir, had risen to the occasion to fight back.

_So now I'm living in some world with a gender-flipped Spider-Man and Black Cat. And it reeks of Sailor Moon on top of that._

And here she thought her _previous_ life as Rachel the Animorph was crazy.

_And now, I'm apparently also a Power Ranger._ No doubt Marco, who had loved to riff on the "_It's morphin' time!"_ tagline all the time, would have found all of this absolutely hysterical.

And then there had been the time gap of about 20 years, give or take, from the late 1990s to the late 2010s. It was weird, seeing this gap, and Rachel saw it not only in technological progress (flip phones were almost extinct but smartphones were everywhere) but in entertainment offerings, too. The _Star Wars_ prequel trilogy was complete, the _Harry Potter_ book series was finished as well as its film adaptations, and so on. And for almost a full decade now, Marvel had been cranking out all these live-action adaptations of the superhero properties, starting with _Iron Man_. And video game systems had become even more powerful, with some new franchises being spawned, while older franchises from her (original) childhood were being rereleased as classics. And all that was just the tip of the iceberg in that regard.

But what _really_ confounded her was the lack of aliens. No Andalites, no Yeerks, no Hork-Bajir or Taxxons or Gedds or whatever... nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Honestly, if there had been an alien invasion and full-blown war anywhere in the world about twenty years ago, she would have known about it. _Everyone_ would have known about it.

Did they even exist in this universe? Had they simply not found Earth yet? Was she maybe living in some sort of parallel universe where the Andalites never made contact with the Yeerks in the first place? Her mind pondered the countless possibilities. Rachel — no, _Chloe_ — had learned to push it to the back of her mind, but her borderline-paranoia about such an alien threat never fully went away.

And yet... the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

She couldn't help it, but she just couldn't keep comparing the people in this life to the people who she knew from her previous life.

Once again, she had to deal with divorced parents, except now the flip side was that she was living with the father instead of the mother. And once again, her mother was basically AWOL. Naomi had been a hotshot lawyer, but Audrey was a spoiled fashionista. As much as Rachel wished she could have had a complete family this time around, she knew that she was honestly better off not being with Audrey.

And then she couldn't help but compare Daniel Berenson to Andre Bourgeois. Daniel was by far a better man and a better father than Andre, with the mayor of Paris being an entrenched politician through and through. Sure, Andre would have been more likely to cut Chloe a check for her needs than actually _check_ on his daughter's needs, but at least he still loved his daughter, and she loved him back. Rachel considered it his best and one redeeming feature.

And as much as she missed her little sisters Jordan and Sara, she felt it was a good thing that she was an only child here, as that meant less children to also suffer the pain of living with divorced parents.

But Rachel-as-Chloe wanted to be independent; she wouldn't use her father's wealth or power to solve a problem, unless it was a true emergency or if she was absolutely desperate. And while he certainly had a lot of money to spare and was willing to spoil her occasionally, she was loathe to let herself be corrupted by such a decadent lifestyle.

She knew she never had to worry about poverty, especially since there was at least one trust fund which she knew about, but it felt good to be independent again.

Not only that, but she got paid to review items, but she had to do so under a fake name. She didn't want anyone to deliberately send her their best offerings just because she was the mayor's daughter.

But the more she remembered her previous life as Rachel, the more she dearly missed not only her friends from that life, but also the power to morph. She just felt so powerless without it.

She also needed something to distract herself from how badly she missed her old life and how out-of-place she felt in this new world.

_It all gives a whole new dimension to the term "imposter syndrome."_

But she refused to let that stop her from doing whatever else she could. The restoration of her "Rachel Memories" she treated as a wake-up call of sorts. She devoured books about how to survive any kind of situation, and then took up classes in martial arts with the argument that she ought to know how to defend herself.

She had been this close to going with jiu-jitsu until she learned about Krav Maga, and she promptly switched to that instead. She'd done her research about instructors for that in the area, and once her father looked over her choice and approved, she promptly started receiving instruction from her best choice, a retired Israeli soldier who spent a lot of his time in Paris and other parts of France.

Most of the adults in her life thought she would get bored of it before long, but she surprised all of them by sticking with it. By the time her thirteenth birthday rolled around, she was already throwing grown men to the floor.

And when Adrien had mentioned getting into fencing (if only to have an excuse not to be confined at home by his own father so much), she naturally jumped on that too.

If only she could fight the occasional nightmares as easily. That first week starting with her twelfth birthday had been rough and she'd almost had a mental breakdown, but she pulled through and perservered through sheer willpower, and her unwillingness to quit or admit defeat.

But one of the most important things in the life of Chloe Bourgeois was her best friend, the first real friend she ever made outside of her family steering her in Adrien's direction: a bakers' daughter by the name of Marinette Dupain-Cheng.

They first met when they were small children: Some nasty boys were bothering Marinette and tormenting her, and Chloe marched right up to them and punched their leader right in the nose, scaring the rest of them into running away.

True, it got Chloe in trouble, but she figured it was worth it just to rescue the other girl. And while Marinette was initially bothered by the violence, she was nevertheless grateful for Chloe's intervention and kindness to her.

And from that day on, they were very good friends.

If anything, they were a good balance for each other: Chloe helped give Marinette confidence to life her up, and Marinette helped Chloe calm down when the anger became too much. The fact that they both loved fashion also helped.

And Marinette wasn't her only friend, either...

There was also Adrien Agreste, son of the fashion icon Gabriel Agreste. If anything, Chloe and Adrien were mostly playmates because their families were rich, and so Chloe had met Adrien well before she Marinette. Still, the blond boy was such a good friend that Chloe was glad to know him.

She missed Tobias... but she also liked Adrien and felt something for him.

Granted, there were some basic similarities between the two, mainly how they both had blond hair and green eyes, as well as good souls... but Adrien was not a replacement for Tobias.

In fact, Rachel-as-Chloe had to do some serious self-instrospection, and to make sure that she wasn't just using Adrien as a replacement for Tobias.

The same went for everyone between both her lives. She had to make a rule after a while: no more comparing Andre to Daniel, Audrey to Naomi, Marinette to Cassie, Adrien to Tobias, and so on.

Even then, she knew deep down that it would do no good to try and project the people she once knew from her old life onto the people she now knew in her new life.

It was all just part of her dilemma, her own personal eternal question: _Where did "Rachel" end and where did "Chloe" begin?_

But then her life took a dramatic turn within a few years of getting all her "Rachel memories" back: The emergence of a new evil which plagued the city of Paris.

A villain calling himself Hawk Moth.

And so Chloe was forced to watch as random, ordinary people — including many of her classmates — were turned into monsters, each of them corrupted by those ugly dark butterflies.

The old her — Rachel the Animorph, buried deep within the psyche of Chloe Bourgeois — _demanded_ that she help fight back. Make no mistake, she was all too happy to cheer on Ladybug and Cat Noir along with the rest of Paris, but she refused to just stand by on the sidelines, pray for victory and hope for rescue.

The constant battles between the heroic duo and the shadowy villain had already been going on for a few months before she'd finally had enough and decided to take matters into her own hands.

Chloe couldn't join in the fight as another combatant trading blows, but she could still outwit them. She'd outwitted at least a few akumas, at great risk to herself, but those moves had paid off in the end. The most notable example was when her classmate Kim had been turned into Dark Cupid, and Chloe tried distracting him with an impromptu date on the hotel rooftop until Ladybug and Cat Noir could show up and fix everything.

This new threat drove Chloe to ramp up her already-insane efforts to make herself a formidable fighter, and once she had learned Krav Maga, then came the other fighting techniques. She also threw herself into the fencing courses which Adrien took.

But in the end, Chloe spent more of her time during these akuma attacks helping others, be they close friends and classmates or completely random strangers. She'd eventually built a reputation as a protectress of the common people and steadily got more praise for it, but she humbly tried to downplay it, to no avail.

This pattern of doing what she could to mitigate the damage caused by all these akuma attacks must have gotten someone's attention, because one morning following a particularly nasty akuma attack, she'd woken up to find an exquisite wooden box outside her bedroom door.

Looking around but seeing no one who could have deposited it there, Chloe had carefully snatched it up and brought it back inside her room, and imagine her surprise when it opened up to show a miniature ball of yellow light...

...which manifested into a small, bee-like creature with large eyes.

It introduced itself as Pollen, and called itself a kwami. Apparently, Ladybug and Cat Noir each had a kwami as well, and that was the source of their powers.

Chloe had been chosen because of her bravery and cunning during the latest akuma attack, and with the uptick in akuma attacks, perhaps it was time for the heroes and protectors of Paris to expand their own ranks.

But before she activated the Bee Miraculous for the first time, she had Pollen tell her _everything_ which the little kwami knew, or at least could divulge to her. She still flashed back to that night so long ago when Elfangor gave them the power to morph, and had stressed the importance of a two-hour time limit, lest any of them become a _nothlit_ (a being forever trapped in morph).

Pollen had explained how the Miraculous worked, and once Chloe was sure that she knew and understood all the rules, she tried it and transformed for the first time.

_I make this outfit look good._

Ever the fashionista, she couldn't help but admire herself for a minute or so until she remembered her new situation and decided to focus on that.

Honestly, she sometimes wished that she'd gotten a Bear Miraculous (assuming that such a one existed at all) instead of the Bee, but she was grateful to have any abilities at all.

Not to mention having Pollen as a friend. The bee kwami was undeniably cute. Felt good to snuggle with, too.

And she had transformed just in time, because only a few minutes after she'd first transformed into Queen Bee, the city's new "akuma alarms" blared, and she took off in the direction of the chaos.

That first battle as Queen Bee was something to remember; she had barely acknowledged Ladybug and Cat Noir, or had even introduced herself as another Miraculous wielder and ally, before jumping straight into the battle.

As Chloe, she had always been forced to keep a cool head and not say or do anything which would embarrass herself or her father... but now, she could really let loose.

It was almost like being Rachel again.

And she _really_ felt like Rachel the Animorph again when she beat the villain to a pulp before Ladybug and Cat Noir could deakumatize him.

And Rachel/Chloe had to remember that this was _not_ the same as being one of the Animorphs all over again. No, it was a wholly different ball game, so to speak.

Obviously, she couldn't morph into any creature she touched anymore, and that also meant no thought-speech communication or healing herself by morphing her wounds away. Not only that, but Hawk Moth was wholly different than the Yeerks; while those alien slugs could control any number of people as hosts with no way to save them short of starving the Yeerks out or killing them in battle, Hawk Moth only used one victim at a time and the evil within could be expunged and purified, so of course she didn't need to kill anyone.

To her shame, Rachel/Chloe in her disguise as Queen Bee had been so consumed by the thrill of battle that she hadn't even considered any of that until Ladybug and Cat Noir had approached her about her violence.

Somehow, their looks of shock, fear, and even disappointment had affected her in a way that even the threat of mortal peril couldn't.

She allowed them to say their piece as they lectured her about any excessive overuse of violence, along with the hinted threat of taking back her Miraculous if she kept doing it. Feeling honestly ashamed of herself, Rachel/Chloe apologized for getting too carried away on her first mission and solemnly promised that it wouldn't happen again.

It was at that point that Rachel/Chloe realized just how messed up she was from fighting that war in her previous life; she was too used to thinking of any and all enemies as monsters to be slain, obstacles to be demolished.

And now she was trying to avoid killing because she was now a superhero. In some ways, holding back from killing was even more difficult for her than actually killing at all.

But she kept her promise, made to both her allies and herself, and she would never give her allies Ladybug or Cat Noir any reason to doubt her in that regard.

But at the same time, it was becoming apparent that she, the new third hero in the group, was having an effect on the original two heroes. They had helped her mellow out a bit and suppress her more brutal instincts... but she could also sense that they were becoming a little more brutal in their fighting as well.

Was it working both ways, with her rubbing off on them and them rubbing off on her? It was starting to look that way.

She knew she needed help, but she couldn't exactly the therapist with the best reviews in the city and explain to them about her existential crisis as someone who'd been reborn in a completely different parallel universe. No, that would have been a one-way ticket to the insane asylum.

It was just something she'd need to deal with on her own.

For what had to be the millionth time in her young life, Rachel dwelled on it: Once again, she was living a life where she was a conventionally attractive blue-eyed blonde, her parents were divorced, she was a fashionista and shopping champion, and she was once again fighting an evil menace which could turn ordinary people into dangerous threats. Oh, and her powers came with time limits too, because of course they did.

_The more things change, the more they stay the same, indeed,_ she thought to herself for what had to be the millionth time as well.

Just then, the alert went off on her phone, coming from the app which everyone in Paris had by now.

_AKUMA ALERT..._

So once again, she's swinging over the skyline of Paris.

And she meets up with Ladybug and Cat Noir on the roof, overlooking the latest threat from the latest akumatized minion of Hawk Moth.

And once again, she's ready to fight.

There's one thing in particular from her past life which she's all too happy to use and carry over into this life...

And before they leap into battle, she says it:

"_**Let's do it!"**_

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AUTHOR'S NOTES: So I was reading a bunch of Good!Chloe fics, and I thought back to a certain blue-eyed blonde from another series: Rachel the Animorph!

A Good!Chloe, especially with it really being somebody like Rachel in Chloe's body, would have a serious ripple effect. It would be all the more likely that this version of Chloe would befriend Marinette at a young age, instead of being enemies. They would likely bond over fashion and such. And another big difference is that Chloe wouldn't be the one responsible for so many people becoming akumatized.

Also, my headcanon is that _Animorphs_ started in 1996 (the year the series itself was first published) to about 1999 or 2000, since their war against the Yeerks lasted three years, and _Miraculous_ takes place in the current day, the late 2010s. So yeah, time jump!

Furthermore, while Jake is the only Animorph whose last name was revealed by the end of the series, Rachel was his cousin and their fathers were brothers, so it makes sense that Berenson would have been her last name too, although who knows if Rachel would have kept the name after her mother divorced her father.

But what really helped motivate me was reading stuff by my fellow writer and new friend **Darthkvzn**, whose story "To Rule Alone, To Build Together" also helped inspire me, so major kudos to him!


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